Chef – Honours Project Concept

Few days ago, we presented our concepts for Honours Projects. My project is looking into the enhancement of the cooking experience, which is a direction that I chose after having very valuable discussion with my bro.

Chef Is an app, designed to facilitate conversations with users who’d like to cook something. Whether it’s going to be a quick simple dish or an adventure full of culinary discoveries, Chef is there to vocally aid the user when he struggles with any part. When there’s a need of a visual clue, Chef still benefits from being ran on a smart devices and their screens to help the user. In order to make sure the conversation works well, part of the solution can be a set of microphone and speaker.

Working title for my project is “Chef” – Short & Simple. To my surprise, I didn’t even find an iOS app that would be called just that.

Why?

After reflecting on my own values and observing the food culture in Scotland, my mission became quite clear:

To reconnect people with the real food.

By enhancing the experience of cooking, people should be encouraged to cook more, or in some cases, start cooking for their first time.

Research

Lot of interviews have been carried out. Some of the respondents don’t cook at all, some of them love to.

I researched what motivates people to cook , what issues they encounter and what breaks their flow and joy when they cook.

Research respondents

Diverse insights were gathered from the user research.

The diversity spans from different capabilities of working with technology that people possess, different motivations to cook (make meal for others, become more healthy, become stronger or save money) as well as varying wishes and fears.

Key insights from the research

By reflecting on the gathered insights & my experience with cooking, I came up with a concept of voice-based assistant for cooking.

This assistant would take on a conversation initiated by a hungry user (or otherwise motivated) to guide him through a joyful cooking session.

Assistant would answer questions related to the recipe (“How much flour should I put in the dough?”) as well as general questions (“Where can I buy ginger now?”).

Check out a quick video that I made to demonstrate that concept:

Design will be applied in the creation of a thinking logic, which will facilitate a conversation leading the user through a cooking process.

The thinking logic and process has to be very sensitive & forthcoming to help the user with his goal.

Conversational logic

Technology which secures a flowing conversation between a human and the device is a great compliment to the main body of work. Omni-directional microphone capturing voice in noisy kitchen, as well as good sound reproduction would be both very useful.

I am quite excited to delve in the crafting of conversations between the technology and people and can’t wait for second semester to start 🙂 Will keep you posted.